The strong brown hand made a movement and was empty.  The ax went circling swiftly through the air, its head showing like a silver crescent against the gray twilight of the trees.  It did not reach its tall objective, but fell among the undergrowth, shaking up a flying litter of birds.  But in the poet’s memory, full of primal things, something seemed to say that he had seen the birds of some pagan augury, the ax of some pagan sacrifice.

A moment after the man made a heavy movement forward, as if to recover his tool; but the doctor put a hand on his arm.

“Never mind that now,” they heard him say sadly and kindly.  “The Squire will excuse you any more work, I know.”

Something made the girl look at Treherne.  He stood gazing, his head a little bent, and one of his black elf-locks had fallen forward over his forehead.  And again she had the sense of a shadow over the grass; she almost felt as if the grass were a host of fairies, and that the fairies were not her friends.

II.  THE WAGER OF SQUIRE VANE

It was more than a month before the legend of the peacock trees was again discussed in the Squire’s circle.  It fell out one evening, when his eccentric taste for meals in the garden that gathered the company round the same table, now lit with a lamp and laid out for dinner in a glowing spring twilight.  It was even the same company, for in the few weeks intervening they had insensibly grown more and more into each other’s lives, forming a little group like a club.  The American aesthete was of course the most active agent, his resolution to pluck out the heart of the Cornish poet’s mystery leading him again and again to influence his flighty host for such reunions.  Even Mr. Ashe, the lawyer, seemed to have swallowed his half-humorous prejudices; and the doctor, though a rather sad and silent, was a companionable and considerate man.  Paynter had even read Treherne’s poetry aloud, and he read admirably; he had also read other things, not aloud, grubbing up everything in the neighborhood, from guidebooks to epitaphs, that could throw a light on local antiquities.  And it was that evening when the lamplight and the last daylight had kindled the colors of the wine and silver on the table under the tree, that he announced a new discovery.

“Say, Squire,” he remarked, with one of his rare Americanisms, “about those bogey trees of yours; I don’t believe you know half the tales told round here about them.  It seems they have a way of eating things.  Not that I have any ethical objection to eating things,” he continued, helping himself elegantly to green cheese.  “But I have more or less, broadly speaking, an objection to eating people.”

“Eating people!” repeated Barbara Vane.